Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

Our reading titled He Makes Us New was written by Patricia Rabin.

As a traveling executive, Sean Sepler wrestled with an odd question,

what happens to leftover soap in hotel rooms?

Thrown out as trash for landfills, millions of soap bars could instead find new life,

Cypler believed.

So he launched Clean the World, a recycling venture that has helped more than 8,000 hotels,

cruise lines, and resorts, turn millions of pounds of discarded soap into sterilized, newly-molded

soap bars. Sit to people in need in more than 100 countries, the recycled soap helps prevent countless hygiene-related illnesses and deaths.

As Cypler said, I know it sounds funny, but that little bar of soap on the counter in your hotel room can literally save a life. The gathering up of something used

or dirty to give it new life is also one of the most loving traits of our Savior, Jesus.

In that manner, after he fed a crowd of 5,000 with five small barley loaves and two small fish in John

6, he still said to his disciples, gather the pieces that are left over, let nothing be wasted.

In our lives, when we feel washed up, God sees us not as wasted lives, but as his miracles. Never throwaways in

his sight. We have divine potential for new kingdom work. Second Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17 says,

therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone.

The new is here. What makes us new? Christ within us.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from John chapter 6, verses 5 through 13.

When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip,

where shall we buy bread for these people to eat? He asked this only to test him, for said to Philip, where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?

He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

Philip answered him, it would take more than half a year's wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite.

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